


The Gambler

by manic_intent



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, M/M, That Wild West AU where Illya is a bounty hunter, Wild West, and Napoleon is a bank robber
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 01:39:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4984972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Illya curled his lip, and walked into the bar, his spurs tapping on the scratched wood. No one bothered to waste the energy to study him, and he sat down at the bar without inviting comment, ordering a beer. The barman took his money without any real enthusiasm, and poured Illya a pint of barely drinkable warm beer. Illya tugged down the brim of his gray Stetson, hiding his eyes, and forced himself to take a sip. Thirst didn’t make the beer any easier to choke down, but Illya was here on business, and it was poor manners to shake the barman for information without actually first buying a drink. </p><p>He unfolded a ragged piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket, smoothing it out on the counter. It was a Wanted poster, with a crude drawing of a man with a bandit mask and a white hat, and the faint hint of dark hair. There was no name under the poster, and only a curt description - six feet tall, male, broad shoulders, white, last seen in a black shirt and black pants, riding a gray horse. Wanted: For a couple of bank heists and a train robbery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gambler

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [The Gambler 投机分子](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5605555) by [blakjc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blakjc/pseuds/blakjc)



> This ficbunny began, as many ficbunnies do, on twitter, when Certain People started discussing a Wild West TMFU idea, and oh god that was it. Wild West stories are, beyond all odds, one of my favourite genres. Red Dead Redemption remains one of my favourite Playstation games of all time. I love Wild West films.
> 
> Things that inspired this fic:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gtXSVGp7Lo Red Dead Redemption! One of my fav fanmade videos ever, set to Johnny Cash’s God’s Gonna Cut You Down ♥ (Fic title inspired by lyrics)  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFfsTsdJfF8 Slow West  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzNnCK5cd8Q And my favorite Wild West film, The Good, the Bad and the Weird.
> 
> So this fic. ~~I’ve always wanted to start at least one story this way.~~

High noon.

The sun-blasted old saloon in the corner of the railroad town was filled mostly with travellers wilting from the furnace of the afternoon heat. There was a shell-shocked couple tucked as far as they could be in a corner of the dusty box of a saloon, the wife fanning herself ineffectively with a folded up newspaper, the husband red-faced and slumped against a wall, mouth occasionally opening and closing, like dying fish. The gray-haired barman with a muttonchop moustache polished a glass with the depressed foreknowledge of a man condemned to a life with nowhere else to go but death. Even the flies were quiet, pinned to the backs of mismatched chairs and the long counter, motionless until swatted.

In a corner of the saloon, up against the wall, was a remnant of a more hopeful time: a faded black piano, its bench long replaced by a three-legged stool. The pianist had given up all semblance of actually earning his keep: sometimes he pressed an ivory key, seemingly at random, occasionally getting a tinkling note, occasionally a dull _plunk_ , hunched over a drink with his back to the world. 

Illya curled his lip, and walked into the bar, his spurs tapping on the scratched wood. No one bothered to waste the energy to study him, and he sat down at the bar without inviting comment, ordering a beer. The barman took his money without any real enthusiasm, and poured Illya a pint of barely drinkable warm beer. Illya tugged down the brim of his gray Stetson, hiding his eyes, and forced himself to take a sip. Thirst didn’t make the beer any easier to choke down, but Illya was here on business, and it was poor manners to shake the barman for information without actually first buying a drink. 

He unfolded a ragged piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket, smoothing it out on the counter. It was a Wanted poster, with a crude drawing of a man with a bandit mask and a white hat, and the faint hint of dark hair. There was no name under the poster, and only a curt description - six feet tall, male, broad shoulders, white, last seen in a black shirt and black pants, riding a gray horse. Wanted: For a couple of bank heists and a train robbery. 

Illya nudged the poster in the general direction of the barman, who deigned to stump over to take a look, then he shook his head slowly. “Not much t’go on. Why’d they even bother with a picture?” _A pick-cha’._

Illya shrugged. “Seen worse.” At least the poster had a description this time. Illya had worked on far less for far longer. As far as he was concerned, logic wasn’t always a close friend of the Pinkertons. 

“Town like this,” the barman said dryly, “You could ‘eave a rock and hit any man what’s six feet an’ white with big shoulders. It’s a railway town what’s built because it’s near a silver mine.” 

Illya nodded, and as the barman wandered back to his desultory glass polishing, he pulled the poster back to himself and began to fold it up, then he paused and glanced up as someone sat down on the bar stool beside him. It was the pianist: a handsome dark-haired man, square-jawed, amused. He had strange, arrestingly mischievous eyes: one blue, one a partial blue, with flecks of brown. He was dressed neatly in clothes that were worn but well cared for, a charcoal gray jacket and an old white shirt, two buttons popped at the throat to show the hint of dark hair beneath, and matching charcoal gray pants over black moccasins. He was unarmed. 

“Big bounty,” said the pianist, peering at the poster. His voice was low, audible only to Illya.

Illya shrugged. Two thousand dollars for a bank thief who had killed no one was indeed a lot of money. He suspected that the banks had pooled the money through the Pinkertons. He also did not care why it had been done.

“You’re a bounty hunter?”

“Obviously.” 

“That accent,” the pianist mused out aloud. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?” 

“So are you.” The pianist spoke with an odd precision, without the twangy drawl that the locals preferred: he was from New York, perhaps, or Boston. To Illya, most of the American accents sounded more or less the same. 

“Not as far as you are, friend.”

“We are not friends,” Illya said flatly, annoyed at the pianist’s casual overtures, but the pianist only grinned at him mischievously. 

“Wish we were,” the pianist said, with a slyness to his tone that Illya recognised, a warm and subtle invitation. Illya looked away, with a slow breath, even as his blood quickened. He hadn’t had a woman for weeks, a man for _years_. How had the pianist known? Or was he just an opportunist? Illya glanced back over, his eyes narrowed, and the pianist’s grin widened. So. An opportunist, and a head-turner at that, probably quite used to getting things his way. 

But Illya was here on business, so he turned his face away, starting to fold away the poster again. He would ask the general store next, then the gun store, if any. He had already tried the railway station, though the stationmaster had been terse and suspicious of strangers with foreign accents.

“I might know something about a bank and train robber who takes pains to kill no one,” the pianist said then, and grinned when Illya glowered at him. 

“Oh?” he asked insolently. The pianist was lying, Illya was certain of that, but even faced with Illya’s rudely expressed disbelief, the pianist’s grin only widened.

“He robbed a Confederate train,” the pianist said blandly. “Not any normal steamer.” 

This time, Illya turned to study the pianist closely. He had heard this from his source in the Pinkertons when he had picked up the contract, but it had not been on the poster, at Confederate insistence. That one man had been able to rob a Confederate-guarded bullion train and make off with spoils had been a source of embarrassment, at least here in the deep South. 

“How did you know that?” Illya asked reluctantly. 

“I hear things here and there.”

“As a pianist?” Illya drawled skeptically. 

“I play the violin as well. One of my many skills,” the pianist said, and again there was that faint slyness to his tone. 

“So what do you know about this thief?”

“How about we talk about that somewhere less public?” the pianist countered. 

“Where?” 

“I have a farm out of town.” 

“Pianist earns so much money?” 

“Land was cheap before the rail came.”

Illya frowned. He still wasn’t sure if the pianist knew anything even useful. The pianist had certainly heard the correct rumours - or perhaps he had made a studied guess - and he certainly wasn’t hiding his ulterior motives. But it was good to be thorough… and besides, it _had_ been a while, and the pianist was handsome enough. 

“Illya,” Illya offered, offering a palm. The pianist shook it. 

“Solo.”

They ended up waiting for the sun to grow mellower. Solo refused to talk about the wanted man, instead playfully quizzing Illya on his background. Illya, in turn, refused to talk about Russia, or why he had ended up so far from home. He was less curt with local news: he had come southwards through a great deal of human ugliness, skirting skirmishes and the dead. He spoke of a forest of the dead: so much dead that people were fainting from the stink of it, the charnel stench of bloat and vomit and blood and cordite.

“Guns!” Solo said wryly, and eyed Illya’s holstered Colt pointedly. “Oh, the right of the people, to keep and bear arms. _What_ people, d’you think? The black man, who is a slave? The natives, whom we’ve destroyed and chased into reserves? The Second Amendment is a white man’s law.”

“As are they all,” Illya pointed out, and his companion chuckled, sardonic, sharply amused. 

“Justice, tranquility, a more perfect union,” Solo said facetiously. “General welfare and liberty. For the white man. For the white woman, even, not so much. Guns give us the liberty to run roughshod over everyone else. And we’re clever creatures, we are. We call owning a gun an expression of freedom. Someday in the future we might even come to believe _that_ without any sense of irony. And yet all the ‘freedom’ that a gun gives a man is the freedom to kill.” 

“You are pianist and philosopher?” Illya asked, surprised at the thread of vehemence in Solo’s tone. 

“Any man - or woman - who has ever looked up at the stars and thought about life is a philosopher.”

“And those who do not?”

“They’re probably dead, or as good as dead,” Solo said, and grinned at Illya slyly, mischievously, and _now_ Illya was curious again. 

The pianist was a puzzle. He had come from the North, that much was likely, from one of the cities: New York, perhaps, or Boston. He was an educated man, perhaps the son of a rich man. He had a little of the erect bearing of a soldier, and yet the easy airs of a man of leisure. His clothes fit too well to have been anything but tailored, and yet he was at ease at a piano in a dead end saloon in a railway town. A man who had once been a rich man, perhaps. Or the son of a family that had long lost its fortune. Yet such men were usually soft, and there was nothing soft about Solo that Illya could sense, for all his airs. 

Solo’s horse cemented Illya’s suspicions about Solo’s previous station in life. The saloon had a communal stable at the back, and as Illya led his chestnut out of the stable, he saw Solo saddling the black Standardbred that Illya had briefly admired when he had tethered his own horse. Solo led out the snorting, high-stepping stallion, all too fine a horse for a town like this, mounting with ease and nudging the horse forward with a touch. They headed east out of the town, which flattened out into sun-baked grass, Solo whistling a tune, Illya silent, thinking. Surely a man who was down on his luck would have quickly traded away a horse that was so beautiful: to friends, at least, who could keep it pampered and groomed. It was the first strange note, about the pianist.

No. It was one of several.

“You live far from town,” Illya commented, after they had been riding for some time - the sun was a little lower in the sky. He kept his hand loose on his thigh, but close to his holster. 

Solo shot him an amused look over a shoulder. “I like the quiet. Though yes, you do run the risk of getting eaten by mountain lions.” 

“Common problem?”

“More than you think.”

“You own a ranch?”

“God no,” Solo chuckled. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

The saddlebags of Solo’s horse, Illya noted, were full. 

They rode until the sun started to sink in the sky, the air beginning to grow colder as the breath of night’s advent began to deepen, and Illya’s hand inched casually further up, until his wrist was nearly touching his holster. There were no houses in sight, only rolling plains, and a forest, coming closer and closer by, a thick, stubborn brushwork of brown and green over the sun-blasted yellow of the grass. 

Finally, Illya said quietly, “You don’t have a farm. Not even a house.” 

Without looking back over his shoulder, Solo replied, amused, “That took you long enough.” 

Illya closed his eyes briefly, irritated. “So this is where you dispose of the bounty hunters who come after you?” he guessed dryly. 

Solo laughed, and now Illya was convinced. He drew his Colt, and Solo’s horse snorted, shaking its head. “I don’t ‘dispose’ of anyone, Illya. By the way, that poster of yours said to bring in the mystery thief alive.”

“I could still shoot your horse.” 

Solo glanced at him, with a frown. “Good luck getting me alive past a war zone with just one horse.”

“Why did you even talk to me in the saloon?”

“I suppose I was curious to know how you tracked me all the way out here,” Solo noted, not in the least afraid, still with that slyness to his tone, looking down the barrel of Illya’s Colt, and _now_ Illya could feel his blood simmer. He took in a slow, harsh breath. 

“Traced the bullion from train. Thought it was most likely used to buy land. You cannot eat gold. Looked at title deeds for the newer railroad towns. Established companies maybe suspicious of bounty of gold bars. Ranchers and landowners, not so much. Money comes back as rent through to bank. Easier to spend.”

Solo sighed. “Good point.”

“You own that town,” Illya said evenly. 

“Not just that town,” Solo corrected, and smiled. “Illya, congratulations on tracking me down. But as it stands, you have no name to that poster of yours. You have no face to it. You have a suspicion and my word and I will most certainly deny that this conversation ever happened, even if you manage to haul me north to justice. I can, however, afford several good lawyers to get me out of any trouble that you see fit to land me in.”

“Or I could hand you over to Confederate army,” Illya countered. “Seeing as you took _their_ train.”

“You could,” Solo said easily, “But the money’s from the Pinkerton contract, and I presume that they were fronted by the banks I visited, not the Confederates.” 

“Pinkertons have offices in the south.”

“Or,” Solo offered, “I could hand you the bounty and a little extra and we can part ways.” 

“Get off that horse,” Illya gestured with his revolver, and when Solo hesitated, Illya cocked his gun and fired. The bullet kicked up dirt an inch from a hoof, and the black horse danced aside in fright, snorting, but was too well-bred to rear and buck off its master. 

“Whoa. All right.” Solo dismounted. Illya did so as well, training his gun on Solo as he took the reins of Solo’s horse, looping them one-handed to his chestnut’s pommel. Illya could trust his own horse not to run. 

“Walk,” Illya told Solo curtly, wanting to herd Solo some distance from the horses before searching him for weapons, in case Solo tried to make a break for it.

Instead of obeying, however, Solo merely took a step closer. “The other way,” Illya said, irritated, and Solo grinned at him again, and this time the slyness was tempered by a dangerous sort of mischief. 

“What are you going to do, shoot me? If I bleed out and die, you won’t get your money.” 

“Could shoot you in leg.”

“You’re not going to shoot me,” Solo said, with an irritating sort of confidence, and now he was too close: Solo was surprisingly quick on his feet. Illya brought up his hand to jab Solo in the throat, but Solo had stepped all the way close, hands closing on Illya’s shoulders, leaning up to _kiss_ him, and now Illya was so startled that he froze, nearly dropping his gun. He let out a startled, breathless noise that Solo swallowed as he licked into Illya’s mouth, again with that irritating confidence, and annoyed, Illya found himself kissing Solo back, roughly, blooding him, kissing Solo until they were drained of air and fighting for breath.

“You. Are crazy,” Illya growled, red-faced, torn between hurting Solo for the hell of it or kissing him again, violence cut cleanly through with lust and wonder. 

“I’ve heard that before,” Solo whispered, with the insane greed of a thief who dared to steal the impossible, and perhaps that was infectious, somehow. Illya decocked and holstered his gun, allowing Solo to pull him down into the grass, the crushed leaves, the baked soil, the smell of horseflesh and sweat. They kissed, entwined, until it was dark, the sun’s bloody face sinking past banks of gray and purple clouds, leaving the sky a black upturned bowl, splashed with stars. 

“This is your ‘little extra’?” Illya hissed into Solo’s ear, and he saw Solo’s teeth flash in a sharp grin.

“I was actually thinking in monetary terms,” Solo admitted, amused. “But sure. What do you want? I can suck your cock,” he offered, trailing his knuckles teasingly up the press of Illya’s cock, straining against his pants. “Best blow you’d ever have.” 

“Prove it,” Illya told Solo, and Solo laughed again, his fingers going nimbly for Illya’s belt buckle. Illya felt a little apprehensive as he was exposed - what if Solo used his teeth - but when Solo navigated undergarments and tugged out Illya’s cock, he whistled, impressed. 

“Or I could ride this instead,” Solo offered, his voice uneven, _thirsty_. “Nice cock like this, deserves to be taken care of properly.” Solo’s educated accent was starting to slip a little, and Illya swallowed, suddenly shaky with lust, thickening further in Solo’s grasp, making Solo gasp. “Actually, I might even prefer to ride this. Do you have oil?” 

“Salve. Maybe.” Illya fumbled as he searched his pockets. Desperation was making it difficult to breathe, let alone concentrate on finding wayward tins. 

“Whatever,” Solo leaned down to kiss the tip, lips teasingly wet. “I’d… I’d use _spit_ at this point if I had to,” he breathed, and Illya groaned. 

They found the salve mixed up in Illya’s ammo pouch, and this felt like madness again, as prep became a clumsy messy rush, like madness, when Solo sank down on his cock, too quickly, too soon. Solo was laughing again, his voice cracking with pain and hoarse with lust and there was something feral in his eyes, something unbroken. Here was a man who was unafraid of the world, the joker of a deck, a man who lived and cared for no one but himself; the most dangerous breed of men in the world by far, and the wildest. Illya set his palms against Solo’s hips and drove him on, careful to leave a string of printed bruises, as they writhed on the dry grass, first with Solo bouncing on his lap, absolutely shameless, then again with Solo on his hands and knees, fingers scrabbling in the dirt as Illya drove into him and bit him on the back of his neck. 

Afterwards they lay on the grass, filthy and spent, and listened to their horses, now some distance away, snorting and cropping grass. Illya could smell sex on their skin and hear madness in the soft dying rumble of laughter that Solo pressed against his neck, and he slept with a dazed unease, an arm curled over the bruises he had marked on Solo’s hips. 

Illya woke in the middle of the morning, alone. He sat up with a start, blinking, and then swore loudly in Russian as he realized that his _horse_ was gone. Stumbling to his feet as he set his clothes to rights, Illya realized that one of his saddlebags had been left on the grass, and he stalked towards it, cursing himself. 

A note had been pinned to it with a rock, scrawled in pencil: 

_Dear Illya, thank you for the lovely evening. Much love, Napoleon Solo._  
_PS. Sorry I took your horse. But I think I probably need the head start. I left you an extra couple of hundred to make up for it. xx_

Illya grit his teeth. Under the note was a neat wad of hundred dollar bills, and Illya knew without counting them that they likely worked out to two thousand, two hundred dollars. He sat against the saddlebag, and cursed a little more, then he sighed, and slung the bag over his shoulder, stuffing the money into his jacket, starting the long walk back towards the railroad town. Now he had a score to settle.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was set in late 19th Century, the time of the American Civil War, Native American removal/forced assimilation policies and slavery, before the culmination of the women’s suffrage movement with the Nineteenth Amendment.
> 
> Mountain lion comment: Play Red Dead and you’ll see. T_T Main cause of my deaths. And I took forever to catch that standardbred... 
> 
> I know, with stuff like this http://www.cracked.com/article_20372_5-ridiculous-myths-everyone-believes-about-wild-west.html out there, it’s kinda lol to write an old-fashioned Wild West fic with guns and heists and things. But what the hell. ;)
> 
> Gun commentary: This case has been weighing on my mind recently. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/06/shot-to-death-before-she-was-old-enough-to-be-shot-at-school.html and stuff like this: http://www.vox.com/2015/10/9/9489599/school-shooting-gun-violence  
> By the way, if you're American and interested in gun control, People magazine has published the contact details of all voting members of House and Senate. You can contact your elected reps: http://www.people.com/article/preventing-gun-violence-people-call-to-action-jess-cagle


End file.
